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I won an award and I am AWESOME!

Too many graphic design award competitions award people for being young and full of ideas. What about the rest of us who are OLDER than YOUNG and maybe filled with better ideas?

I think experience and wanting to keep doing NEW is worth something, no?

So you can now be AWESOME too. At any age. Go here.

Courtesy Jessica Hische; found via Jessica Walsh

Typographic soft porn, via Italy

Last week I attended TYPO in San Francisco and noticed that my notebook was full. No room for notes.

My solution was the #typo13 hashtag, Twitter, plus big fingers and cranky iPhone. Everything I attended I tweeted, autocorrect had other ideas, TYPO ended up meaning typo.

Typically if I go on a tweeeeting binge like this, I lose ‘followers’ and get bitched out a bit. Instead I ended up meeting some cool people from around the planet.

Sol Kawage lives in South Tyrol, a ‘german speaking region in northern Italy.’ Her tagline on her Twitter account states: ‘Annoying people since 1980.’

Pics are from her blog, cool holdings of a small Museum of Modern Art in the City of Rovereto. More here and here.

FUSE, then TYPO

In 1998 I attended this over-the-top crazy creative conference in San Francisco.

It was called FUSE: Beyond Typography and it was a Neville Brody gig, named for his font magazine. The whole shebang overstuffed itself into San Francisco’s Masonic Center on Nob Hill. And what happened inside was really ‘beyond typography,’ in that the typophiles I knew were complaining where’s the type? It made sense. It was BEYOND.

It was many days. I think a week. Maybe a month, a year? I don’t remember. Nob Hill is up in the clouds, which was fitting. But what I do know is the speakers – which ranged from budding architects Zaha Hadid and Michael Sorkin to author Karrie Jacobs and a slide show from soon-to-pass-on Tibor Kalman – left me recharged about graphic design and what a real creative can do.

Then, turned out the week of FUSE Phil Hartman died.

And

2001 changed everything.

And the economic disaster that followed also put a lot of creative plans on hold. I quit my corporate job right after FUSE and moved on to more meaningful work, eventually landing in teaching. I kept doing the fun work, but bread-n-butter work started to take over. Survival became more important as creativity was pushed aside.

In 2007 I left my position as president of the Art Directors and Artists Club of Sacramento and from a distance, saw it shut down early 2012. BUT I did remember the spark of FUSE (which was a money-loser for the organizers) and kept side projects going. I started this very blog, released a few fonts. [Read more →]

‘Who are modern Russian designers?’

Modern graphic design has roots in Russian Suprematism and Constructivism. Here’s a trailer for a film by Sergey Shanovich that looks at what’s been happening since.

Facebook page here.

Found via Motioncollector

Sunday Rock, analog Cyrillic



‘Specialization of our school is contemporary music teaching for kids and teenagers’

Modern Dog recently created this poster for Sunday Rock, a music school in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

And I provided Robynne and Co. some quick Cyrillic type the old fashioned way: Scanned in from early 20th Century sources, pieced together letter by letter.

Four different scripts combined to have similar weight, rough edges, heavy caps. I’ve been doing a bunch of work this way lately – sometimes one has to go back to basics.

And on weathered days (like today) vinyl sounds better than digital.

Bauhaus. World Changing. Education. Media.

I will be giving a talk on April 19 at American River College. Covered will be the history of the Bauhaus (1919-33).

And as an add-on, I’ll be subtly previewing how the Bauhaus, Futurism and early Modern Art has inspired my new educational project, FLomm: THE BATTLE For MODeRN 1923 (which already has a tumblr presence here and twitter here).

For additional information, please visit the Art New Media at American River College Facebook page here.


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